The story of the government contract to build five multi-story apartment buildings in the Leningrad Region for 290 million rubles and within 30 days has taken a new turn. Today, the antimonopoly service held a hearing on our complaint (RosPil was represented by kostyaterehov), which was filed against the actions of the Leningrad Region administration, the body that conducted this tender. As a result: The Federal Antimonopoly Service found the complaint fully justified; An order will be issued to cancel the tender; The customer’s officials will be held administratively liable; The case materials will be forwarded to law enforcement authorities (the prosecutor’s office). Let’s dwell on point 4 in more detail, because we have something to say about it. Thanks to the good people who responded to our request, we were able to quickly inspect the construction sites where the buildings are supposed to be built. Supposed to be. In the future. After all, the money (290 million rubles, about $9.3 million at the time) has only just been allocated to the “winner.” The auction results were announced on October 3. So: Luga
Volkhov
Kingisepp
http://youtu.be/JOGWJ2C90Ng There are no photos yet from Boksitogorsk or Lodeynoye Pole, but witnesses say it’s the same there. (Many thanks to everyone who promptly helped with the on-the-ground fact-finding.) As we can see, the buildings are already almost finished. Construction began several months ago. The tender documentation was entirely fraudulent, and evidently a number of officials in the Leningrad Region administration, acting in collusion, knew this. This sham tender was simply meant to legitimize the transfer of budget funds through a bidding process with a predetermined outcome. We’ve been sent a lot of information about ties between these builders and certain officials who organized this scheme, but we won’t publish it yet. It needs to be verified. But there is already enough material to open a criminal case. The officials’ usual excuse — “300 million rubles just suddenly fell from the sky and had to be spent urgently” — clearly won’t work here. Why stage a fake tender? If apartments are needed, ready-made ones can be purchased in the normal way. I see two possible scenarios: The crooks built the apartment buildings, sales were poor, and they decided to dump them on the least demanding buyer of all — the Russian federal budget. To make sure that nobody else, God forbid, could sell their apartments instead, they imposed an impossible condition: a construction period of one month. Crooked officials in the Leningrad Region knew there was money available for construction. To steer the contract to their own company and squeeze out competitors, they arranged for the builders to start work at their own expense and then guaranteed them victory in a tender with deliberately impossible terms. Under either scenario, about 25% of the 290 million rubles would have gone to the crafty Leningrad Region officials. The answers to the remaining questions should now be sought not by RosPil, but by the Investigative Committee. That’s the kind of cheerful business going on. And yet people talk about the “principle of officials’ good faith” and the Federal Contract System. It seems Medvedev was again talking just yesterday about oversight of government procurement and fighting corruption. Well then, go fight it. We’ve prepared all the materials. PS We will, of course, also file our own crime report.